Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.
For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.
(Romans 16:17-18)
To me, the most distressing thing about the current election is not the partisanship. That is to be expected. And I am sadly getting used to the fact that partisans, especially extreme partisans, tell lies. What astonishes me is how susceptible the American public is to believing outright fabrications. How helpless we seem to be in the face of deliberate manipulation. How unable we are to distinguish good sources of information from bad. And how stubbornly we cling to mistaken beliefs.
Buzzfeed recently did a week-long, in-depth study of nine Facebook sites. Three were mainstream news sites and six they identified as “hyperpartisan” — three from the right and three from the left. They rated every post as “mostly true,” a “mix of true and false,” “mostly false,” and “no factual content.” They concluded that, “During the time period analyzed, we found that right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages.”
They also noted that, left or right, “The more overtly partisan, misleading, or opinion-driven a post was, the more engagement the post would see, according to our data. Facebook, and the people using it, appears to reward the worst tendencies of these pages.” In other words, people are more likely to read, “like,” and share partisan lies and opinions than facts.
The article points out that this tendency leads to an “Echo chamber” effect that increasingly polarizes people. “One thing we noticed when trying to fact-check posts was that these pages, and the websites connected to them, largely aggregate information from elsewhere. That wasn’t surprising. What was notable was that the right-wing pages almost never used mainstream news sources, instead pointing to other highly partisan sources of information.”
“Based on our analysis, we found the hyperpartisan right-wing echo chamber to be more polarized than its counterpart on the left, and our sense is that this likely contributes to the tendency for right-wing Facebook pages to promote false and misleading information.”
Then, to make matters worse, the algorithms for both Facebook and Google are designed to analyze what you read and give you more of the same. The more people read hyperpartisan Facebook posts or web sites “the more polarized they will likely become — and the more their worldviews will be based on information that is misleading or completely false.”
If you want accurate, truthful, political information, this study rated Politico and CNN Politics quite high. If you want to know what happens to democracies when people believe lies and vote demagogues into power, read the Book of Mormon.
Interesting.